But what happens to beauty when nature and time happen? Pleasing decay, the picturesque beauty that is captured in Chrissy Collinson’s paintings and drawings is what happens. As art objects they are certainly beautiful and jewel like, being small and perfectly detailed. But the subject matter depicted is the effect of entropy – time and nature – and the roughness and irregularity it creates on the unseen urban architecture and landscape within the city: the city in this case being Chrissy’s home city of Hull.

Under the Bridge

Liverpool based artist Josie Jenkins’ paintings reflect her time spent during residencies in the Chinese city of Xiamen, a city undergoing rapid industrialisation. It is a city is surrounded by a landscape of natural beauty and this can be glimpsed in Josie’s rendering of the city’s architecture set against a backdrop of distant hills and mountains: the manmade presence is in stark contrast to the beauty of the loosely painted blue and green hills. The compositions and paint become a metaphor for the changes the city as a whole is undergoing from the impact of western consumer society.

Winter Solstice, Stac an Armin

John Elcock’s paintings provide the viewer with respite from the contemporary excesses of beauty aesthetics by finding a beauty in a ploughed field, and a lump of stone.

By rendering a more contemplative landscape of the mundane, that ever present beauty that we ourselves can find is celebrated in a quiet manner.

John’s paintings suggest a beauty that is based on more than appearances, and how beauty is something that invokes feelings of love.

Personal recollections of my natural homeland in the Scottish Highlands and upbringing in central Africa, specifically Malawi and Zimbabwe, inform the eclectic abstract paintings, characterised by an aesthetic drawn from African and Western cultural memories.

Inspired by the colourful wall paintings of the Ndebele women of southern Africa who decorate the walls of their homes with abstract symbols to express themes of cultural resistance, continuity, aspiration and celebration, I find my art practice to be an amalgam of what I perceive as a dual cultural identity best described as my inescapable ‘Two Tribes’.

There appears to me to be an affinity between the African tribal and Scottish clan systems, and just as the Northern Ndebele were displaced in a Zulu diaspora, I find a relevance in Scottish clan history with the Highland clearances and exodus of dispossessed people. This leads me to be interested in concepts of ‘displacement’ and material choices become important in the making of the work.

The square format favoured relates to the textiles, kilts and quilts that identify both tribes and clans. I enjoy the concept that by hanged the work in any orientation the painting may offer up a surprising new perspective.

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Flesh as a subject is a beautiful, natural aspect of the human form which can conflict the emotions desire and revulsion, visualise various forms of weight and even dramatic folding of skin; it is these aspects I find truly fascinating. Within my oil paintings, the abstraction of these organic forms becomes the forefront of investigation. The abstract allows me as a painter to stretch the boundaries and perceptions of the flesh, creating new forms which have been manipulated from various existing sources and observations. The abstract also allows the viewers and I greater conversation with the painting’s forms, evoking perhaps sympathies or contrastingly revulsions for the bodily painting.

There is reference to both bodily and landscape contours within the ambiguous paintings with each beginning with no end composition in mind. They are built with a continuous method of slow, looking, fast painting and consistently share a specific flesh toned palette.

At present the abstracted flesh battles with an ephemeral atmosphere contrasting the weight of solid flesh forms against a clouded space of memory and void.

Notions of structure and chaos initially informed my work to create a series of abstract paintings that depicted structured geometric forms and chaotic watercolour background. Over time my practice has moved away from exploring chaos and structure; with my work becoming more concerned with exploring where the boundaries lie between painting and sculpture and whether they can be broken.

Using elements of both painting and sculpture in my work I deliberately confuse the boundaries to leave the viewer questioning whether my work is a sculpture or a painting often presenting paintings like sculptures and sculptures like paintings. Through this my practice has recently moved into installation where my abstract paintings have started to come to life. Drawing back on the original themes of chaos and structure I create interactive spaces which invite the viewer to become part of the work by moving the painterly sculptures around.